Tony Abbott, the sociopath who is likely to be Prime Minister under the Liberal party, has stated that he thinks global warming is 'bullshit', and intends to cut funding for renewable energy programmes.

There undoubtedly was a group of hard right paranoiacs in Mi5 who lost the plot in 1970s; I suspect they never really understood the Soviet Union very well.But in Ireland (and against the left and the trade unions) the security services were not chasing anyone's tail. They understood the 'threat' all too well, and had it under surveillance, infiltrated, and neutralized by the late-1980s. And many people - guilty, compromised or innocent - were killed.

And a quote in the comments

The unspoken truth though is that the IRA, NUM, SWP etc. were all full of people whose ultimate allegiance was to the British state, and were easy to turn.They just didn't realise their allegiance (to the civil religion, ultimately) until they actually had to take real action against it.Joe Gormley, who led the '72 miners strike, then spied on Scargill for Special Branch, is the paradigm example of this kind of character schism.This is why I take the piss out of people like Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore etc. The loudest Irish Republicans are the classic "deep Brits".

Most of the stuff I've read under evolutionary psychology has been a little bit eyebrow raising. Especially the stuff that seems to be pretty frantic attempts to justify a part of the status quo as it stands now by reaching back to pre-stone age times - although even the written history and even the modern world contradicts their theories.

Miller's work is a more erudite version of a lot of what you see in the pickup artist (PUA) and men's rights scenes. In both groups, the common sense belief is that sexuality is based on a very old game that isn't terribly different from clubbing women on the head and dragging them back to an anthropologically inaccurate cave. Other kinds of human relationships aren't much better. I guess you could say that evopsych douchebags are the academic version of pickup artists. They throw you negs on Twitter, but only if you're a potential Ph.D. student.

The stories also show how elites in Britain have used the aura of secret knowledge as a way of maintaining their power. But as their power waned the "secrets" became weirder and weirder.

They were helped in this by another group who also felt their power was waning - journalists. And together the journalists and spies concocted a strange, dark world of treachery and deceit which bore very little relationship to what was really going on. And still doesn't.

Maybe I shouldn't have turned off all the lights are started listening to Spektrmodule before I started reading this. On the other hand...

Australia's current Prime Minister (we have an election on Saturday where he's probably going to be kicked out) was on the QandA last night - a show where the audience get to question politicians and other movers and shakers. A "Pastor" asked him how he could call himself a Christian and support same-sex marriage. His response demolished the guy...

Mexican prosecutors are investigating claims that a female vigilante killer is behind the murder of two bus drivers last week in the northern border city of Ciudad Juárez, apparently seeking revenge for the sexual abuse of female passengers.An email from the self-styled "bus driver hunter" claiming responsibility for the assassinations echoed deeply in Ciudad Juárez, which has a grim history of sexual violence against women on buses.